Honolulu Academy of Arts
900 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96814
www.honoluluacademy.org
Nau Ka Wae (The Choice Belongs to You)
An installation by Kaili Chun
Henry Luce Gallery
On view through July 30, 2006
Artists of HawaiI : Juried exhibition
Henry Luce Gallery
Juror: Edmund Capon, Director, Gallery of New South Wales
On view through July 30, 2006
ARTafterDARK HOUSE
House music by DJ Mark Chittom
Food and drinks by Indigo Restaurant
Art House project, produced by the Honolulu Printmakers
Sponsored by Pacific Home
Friday July 28, 2006 6:00-9:00 p.m.
ARTafterDARK is a dynamic group of young professionals dedicated to exploring the arts. Events are held on the final Friday of every month, February through October.
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Kaili Chuns installation, Nau Ka Wae (The Choice Belongs to You) opened in June and will be on view until July 30, 2006, concurrent with the Honolulu Academy of Arts juried exhibition Artists of Hawaii.
Chuns work is informed by a sense of creative lineage, one that places her within a matrix of native Hawaiian history and culture that has found increasingly powerful expression in her work. Chuns years of graduate education coincided with a time of growing awareness in the native Hawaiian community of the need to reclaim greater visibility and autonomy for indigenous culture. She thus felt compelled to make choices that would shape both her development as an individual artist and her identity as a member of the Hawaiian community. Her initial response was to embrace the spirit of militant advocacy, and through this desire she created work that used Hawaiian spears as icons of cultural power. Chun has now moved from the militant to the meditative, beyond anger to a more contemplative but no less intensely dedicated perspective on these enduring concerns.
Nau Ka Wae (The Choice Belongs to You), Chuns installation created by the artist as the recipient of the Catharine E. B. Cox Award at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, invests the themes of knowing and the framing of knowledge. Chuns interest in the creation of installations-time- and site-specific integrated configurations of sculptural elements-has, until now, made the space secondary to the physical forms that temporarily inhabit that space. In Nau Ka Wae, a shift in sensibility is evident in both the clear delineation of a dedicated space (a room contained within the larger space of the gallery) and the placement of sculptural forms in a way that defines both the perimeter and the heart of that space. As a result, viewers cannot view the work from a distance, but must enter it, become contained within it, activating its imperative of choice as they define their own pathways in and through the space. Nau Ka Wae becomes a sanctuary, a place of reflection and meditation resonant with the signs of both indigenous belief and Western religious concepts.
